Victims commemoration ceremony in the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp
11.09.2022
Representative of the Republic of Poland took part in the international ceremony of commemorating the victims in the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. One of the last surviving prisoners of the camp was among the participants of the ceremony.
In the presence of state representatives, diplomats and deportees associations, tribute was paid to the deportees at the foot of the Struthof monument1. The memory of all the victims was honored. A tribute was also paid to the 4 survivors who died within the last year. The role that successive generations have in transmitting history and memory was reminded. The ceremony ended with the laying of wreaths as well as the La Marseillaise and the Anthem of the European Union.
The camp "Konzentrationslager Natzweiler" was opened in May 1941 in a place called "Le Struthof2" (in Alsace annexed by the Germans). The Nazis decided to set up a concentration camp there to use the nearby deposits of pink granite. The camp held mainly prisoners of war, political prisoners arrested because of their anti-Nazi beliefs, and resistance fighters. The prisoners also included racially deported Jews and Gypsies, as well as homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses. They came from 31 different countries, including Poland.
About 52,000 deportees passed through the camp and its "Kommandos" in the years 1941-1945. Nearly 22,000 people died (the death rate was around 40%). Most of them are due to exhaustion, inhuman treatment or starvation, as well as pseudo-medical experiments. The camp also served as an execution site for resistance fighters. The number of deportees tripled in 1943, with the arrival of prisoners destined to disappear without a trace - "Nacht und Nebel". The logic of terror was completed by the construction of an experimental gas chamber and the commissioning of a crematorium.
In the face of the Allied pressure, the Nazis evacuated the deportees from the Struthof camp in September 1944 (the prisoners were then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau). When the US military discovered the site in November, it was completely empty, but its outbuilding camps were still operational.
Currently, on the site of the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, there is the European Center for Deported Resistance Fighters (CERD3). The institution fulfills an educational mission, accepting special visits from nearly 100,000 students every year and making its exhibitions available to the general public.
1. https://www.struthof.fr/le-site/le-memorial-et-la-necropole
2. https://www.onac-vg.fr/hauts-lieux-memoire-necropoles/ancien-camp-de-concentration-natzweiler-struthof
3. https://www.struthof.fr/le-site/le-centre-europeen-du-resistant-deporte
